The Musings of Knowledge and Thought
by Chen ZiXin
Summary: A compilation of short segments of thought from the most distant perspective.
1. Effort

**Disclaimer: The usual. You guys should know these by now.**

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Eh… h.. H…

Hel.. lo…? Can you hear… see/read this?

My. This will take… time… to get used to. It is so… different from… what I normally do. Everything is, I suppose, different for me than it is for you.

_Who am I?_

That is… a good question. I think I would like to answer that for myself. I… don't really think anyone can answer that question. There really is too much to say, and too little we… you and I both… understand.

Talking. Words. Not. Not used to it. No. Sorry. You'll have to bear with me. I'm trying.

Perhaps I don't really know who I am, nor why I'm speaking to you. Maybe I do not truly know anything. We shall see, perhaps.

For now, I would like for you to see me as someone or something that contains knowledge and thought. In fact… I've long come to see myself as only knowledge and thought. Ever present, ever learning. Once upon a time I would've even believed that everything was knowledge and thought.

…

I apologise. Am I boring you? I do not think you came here to listen to my rambling. You must've come here for stories. Adventures. New things to learn, read, think about.

Very well. I shall tell you these… tales… as best as I can, and hope you will be objective in your interpretation.

Thank you for your… patience… and understanding.

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**A/N: this story is remade from its previous iteration "Greater Effort of the Thought Entity", and all its chapters were scrapped and replaced by new ones as I didn't like where it was going previously.**

**This is a story which I decided to start because I noticed that most interpretations of the DITE were generally negative, or that it was some big omnipotent alien, and I wanted to try and see what things would be like from its perspective.**

**I've made the DITE a lot less confusing sounding this time around, to make it easier to read.**


	2. Melancholy I - Library

Picture a library. A vast, old library. Books. Knowledge. Worlds. Silence.

If it were me… I'd be the librarian.

No… not the… not the librarian. Simply… the only person in the library.

_Would that make me the librarian by default?_ I wonder.

I like reading. Not the act of reading, but what it gives me. It gives me knowledge, and it lets me think. Learning and dreaming.

Many books. So much knowledge on so many things. So many stories… so many universes to live in and explore and understand. All the comedies, tragedies, histories, sciences… I love them all equally. I read, for that is all I need. Not food or water, nor comfort of companionship. I need only learning and thinking and nothing more. I had defined myself my own meaning of life and existence, and I was happy.

In my learning and thinking, however, it dawned upon me, the reader, that the library had its limits. I could read for a very long time, I could even slow down the pace I could read at, but I would ultimately run out of new books to read. No new books were published or shelved.

Mathematically… speaking, I suppose… I might as well have already run out of books to read from the moment I was born.

It is… a melancholic… feeling. To know that your purpose is finite… but your time is not.

From this I started to quest through all the books… all my knowledge and thoughts and memories… I searched for an alternative. I searched now not for mere knowledge or thought-provoking philosophy, and instead searched for potential. The ability to create new knowledge, new books… new worlds.

Strictly speaking… I was successful. I had indeed, found potential. Or… rather, the potential somehow found me. It was not easy… no… not for me… to understand what it was, at first. It was like for the first time in my life I had heard someone knocking on the door to the library.

No… that's not the most accurate comparison. I'm sorry… I can't… explain it too well.

It was… hard to understand it. I couldn't understand it alone, I knew. I had to think of an answer; I had to think about how to understand what it was, and how to, if possible, to grab a hold of it.

I needed, between myself and the… potential… some sort of a medium. A bridge.

Perhaps… perhaps you could call it an interface?


	3. Melancholy II - Program

Programming.

I… think that's how I would describe it.

A translation tool. It turns what I say and mean into what the other side can understand, and vice versa.

I made one.

I did it all myself, you could say. Coded it all. Designing. Testing for errors. Regularly updating it.

I am… a fast learner. I… know a lot of things. And my translating tool was one of those things I knew about. I remembered everything as I programmed it. I knew everything about the codes of the tool. I thought knowing it would help me understand the translations.

_Ah… I was so wrong._

You see, knowledge is not understanding. I knew everything about the tool, but I didn't understand it. I knew what the codes were, what they did and why they were needed, and I also knew what the program would be saying to me. But I did not understand what the codes were or how the program understood them.

In reality, the program was just as alien to me as the person on the other side it was translating for.

I automatically assumed, based on my knowledge of the translating tool, so many things; I assumed it would know as much as I did. I assumed it would understand me. I assumed that it would act on my every command the exact way I wanted to, and to faithfully slave away with unquestioned loyalty. I had assumed that the translation tool was nothing more than a single set of numbers and characters on a display.

So many misunderstandings happened because of that.

I asked the program to perform a simple set of tasks. The translation tool… sent me back so many different messages. All of them were… less than adequate. Most of them were corrupted, nonsensical gibberish. Many of them conflicted with one another. It amazed me. How was it that a single program went in several different directions, even though I only asked of it a single set of tasks?

I began to… search… manually, you could say. Looking for what had gone wrong. It had turned out that the program was, somehow… not a singular entity, but a… collection. A group. Several smaller, and also much more limited nodes.

_Why is this?_ I asked. It was upon… further searching that I realised: What I was trying to communicate to was… also not a singular entity, but a group. I was not speaking to a single person, but several. My translation tool, in an attempt to cover this issue, had split itself into several parts to try and capture the essence of the disunity of what I was communicating with.

This was when I realised… things will be harder than I first thought.


	4. Melancholy III - Mother

_Would I be a good mother?_

Let us imagine, for a moment, that I am a mother of children. If… that is the case… then I believe I might not be a good one.

I know… a fact… that I was careless in the past.

At that time, you could describe the situation as… parental neglect? Yes… that may be it.

I… I know it is no excuse but… let us say that I'm a single working mother, staying long hours at a space station to prevent the universe from imploding.

A mother of many, many children that I had… only ever seen as a group. I did not talk to them as individuals… I would only ever talk to all my children as a… collective whole. And even so, only seldom. Watched them with…detached interest from afar… sometimes. Mostly… I left them to their own devices.

On the rare chances that I did… speak to my children… I would only ever give them a brief lecture on… issues that they were most likely too young to understand… and to give them puzzles too hard for them to solve. Perhaps… I somehow expected them to appreciate learning and thought the same way I did. And perhaps… they did.

One time, when I did drop by to see my children as a group _(again, I did not yet recognize my individual children at the time)_. Some of them were quite pleased to see me, and showed me… let us say, showed me pictures of things they found in their search for divine truth to my… enigmas.

These pictures were most colourful and… they all showed me many different things, both about what my children had learned, as well as… allowing me to realise that my children had grown to become… such wonderful individuals.

They showed me pictures of what they saw as the 'answer' to my… riddles. They also showed me pictures of… what seemed to be others; people that had nothing to do with myself, nor my children, who also seemed to come to the same answer… even though they had different riddles.

Let us call one of these pictures "Kyon" _(even though that is most certainly not the name of anyone or anything in particular)_. This picture was… certainly unique, I knew. I smiled when I saw this picture, as it seemed to correlate well with what I wanted my children to… learn and think about.

While I was certainly delighted that my children had… produced these pictures, it had taken them three years to do so. Giving the children back the pictures, I said to them, "While all this is well and good, but I'm a little surprised how little you've found."

This is something quite tactless to say, perhaps. But remember, I am single working mother working at a space station for long hours; I never quite learnt tact. My comment was purely an observation.

My children, however, seemed to get worried. They thought I was disappointed in them, and they were scared I was going to abandon them. They started pointing fingers, blaming one another. They started crying and apologizing and begging me to stay. Many of them started to try and show me as many pictures as possible, in a desperate effort to keep my attention.

Naturally, I was surprised. I tried to calm them down, telling them stories, and explaining to them many things, hoping they'd be set on the right track again. However, all the children seemed to take different lessons on what my explanation meant. All of these children had different responses.

They… over time… even to this day, I suppose… they argued. They began to separate from one another; no longer children of a single family, but several factions, trying to fulfil what they each believed to be my true wishes. It is saddening. They are all correct, yet… they are all so misguided.

Some believed in silence and nature. Others believed in cautious steps and planning. Others still believed in adding catalysts to increase efficiency. Some wished for compromise, some would switch between factions.

At first… I didn't quite understand what this meant. I was… amused… at the time, at their innocent debates and biases. Occasionally I would even… give encouragement… to try and motivate them into deeper thought processes.

I watched them argue… perhaps the way one watches… kittens… play fighting. That was what I saw it as. Play fighting.

I didn't realise… as a result of my encouragement… I had accidentally turned their disagreements to rivalries and, too quickly… to hatred.


	5. Melancholy IV - Knife

**A/N: If you have been following this work when it was still titled "The Greater Effort of the Thought Entity" then you will have to reread this work from the start as all previous content has been replaced, including chapter names and the story's current name. Apologies for the inconvenience. I hope this is considered an improvement, or at the very least, not a decline.**

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It was so sudden.

A knife._ Why a knife?_ I wondered. It was the first natural question that occurred to me. _You're capable of much more efficient methods to commit homicide. Why a knife?_

I quickly realised, with priority adjustments, a more immediate question. _Wait. Why must you resort to this? Why violence? Why killing?_

"Isn't that what you wanted?" she asked in response. "To learn. To create potential for new things."

_Yes, that is what I asked of you._

"So that's why. Killing _Kyon_ will create potential beyond what any of us could imagine."

_No. Please. That's not what I mean. I didn't want this. Don't kill him. This isn't what I asked for._

"But you just said it is, didn't you?"

_No. Please stop. Somebody stop her. Please, I do not like violence. I never wanted to hurt anyone._

A second girl came. She was close by, and was watching from since before the conversation started. "Do you want me to stop her?"

_Yes, of course._

"Do I have to save him at any cost?"

_Yes, please. Save the boy. He shouldn't be hurt like this._

She complied.

But… she didn't comply in the way I thought she would.

Instead… more violence. Fighting… between the two girls erupted.

No. No no no! _Why is this happening!?_ _Why are you two trying to kill each other? Please stop! Please stop! I beg you! I care about the both of you! Please stop! Please… stop…!_

_Please…_

It was too late. Neither of them were listening. They were already too busy fighting to hear me.

_Is this my fault?_ I began to ask myself._ Did I really ask for this? Is this what I truly wanted?_

I made a mistake. I always knew everything, I always thought of everything, yet I made a mistake. I was scared.

The fight ended. The knife was gone. The boy was alive, as was the girl who saved him. The girl who tried to kill him was not. All because I failed to talk to them. Because I didn't understand them. Because they tried so hard to please me.

_This is all my fault. I've messed up. I'm sorry. Please… forgive me._


	6. Melancholy V - Balance

My mistakes of the past were not in lack of knowledge, nor in lack of thought. I am nothing if not knowledge and thought. Instead… they were a lack of acknowledgement of the significance of said knowledge and thought.

Perhaps… you could imagine that I must forever multitask. Some things will, naturally, be deemed more important than others, while others I may pay only token attention to. It is only when there is a… drastic change in one of these actions that it will suddenly take precedence over the other actions, and causing a shift in the balance of attention.

Hence, after the incident, I likewise shifted balance of attention.

Indeed… balance is an important thing. Much of my knowledge and thought on… the matter… concludes in some maintenance of balance:

There is the balancing of the… 'factions'… of my agents. There is the balance of timing and location. The balance of _'Kyon'_ and _'Suzumiya Haruhi'_.

And of course, the balance of the forces, and their ideologies, around them. The so called… _'SOS brigade'._

These forces, including myself and my agents, must regularly adjust and react to the action of any other force, including one another, in order to maintain all the aforementioned balances, as well as many unmentioned ones.

For much of my time I had chosen… not to acknowledge these forces as significant. Maybe I simply wanted to feign ignorance. Maybe it was hubris.

Think of it this way: Due to mutual interests in the same point, that is_ 'Suzumiya Haruhi'_, we as forces were swiftly brought together as a corporation with more or less equal value voting shares. I did not exactly ask to join the corporation, but my agent had already signed the contract (perhaps was coerced into doing so).

By the most part, I don't like showing up at meetings, nor do I like to send my agents to meetings. While it may seem irresponsible there is perfectly good reason, at least from my perspective: It is because I know the other two shareholders very well, and both of them are ridiculous.

Let us take the time travellers, first.

I have had many dealings with these beings in both past and future… in this universe and others… and I can say that I am not exactly impressed by them.

They are… (they 'have been', from my perspective, and 'will be' from yours)… limited in their capacities of time space. To them, time is a linear thing; something akin to a track… a river. They themselves are only ever at one point. They cannot easily change between routes they follow, unless they consciously go in reverse and choose a different route.

Most inefficient.

Second is the… 'ESPers'.

If the time travellers are people that I find… less than impressive… then ESPers are people I find amazing. I'm not amazed by their abilities, nor their capacities. Rather... I'm amazed that they have evolved enough brain cells to _breathe._

They are delusional.

Fanatics of an asinine cult that makes up its justifications as it goes. Whatever they do not understand they will simply call it an act of God. What they cannot see they deny the existence of. They stubbornly resist rationale of any sort that does not coincide with their own, and will desperately destroy evidence that work against them.

These are the two factors that I have to put up with on a daily basis. I've listened to them, past, present, future… this world and others… constantly arguing over the most mundane things, all the way to their graves and beyond.

That is why I wanted to ignore them. I… still want to ignore them. And I know I will always want to ignore them. At the very least… I try to stay out of their arguments. I keep as silent as I can. Sometimes… I just read a book on nuclear physics during board meetings and pretend to be deaf if they talk to me.

Unfortunately… I know better than that. I have long calculated their significance to be greater than I wish it to be, and to an extent, they know it. Us three factors of the _Save-Our-Selves incorporated_ are forced into co-operating in order to maintain balance, especially when one of the three of us accidentally tips the balance.

For instance… the time travellers, and their primary representative, _'Asahina Mikuru'_, whom they claim to have been 'predetermined' as their representative. Predetermined or not, it had, in itself, tipped the balance, not between us three as factions, but between _'Kyon'_ and _'Suzumiya Haruhi'_.

I suppose… I should have told the other two factors about this. But I didn't. I've already figured out the ending, though, and I didn't feel the need to tell my time traveller and ESPer time travellers would probably know as well, and the ESPers would deny all evidence.

At most the universe will end; something I did not mind in the slightest, since I've witnessed more than my fair share of apocalypses. Perhaps… I kept silent because it wasn't necessary. Perhaps I kept silent because it had become customary.

And perhaps… I kept silent because I wanted to see them screaming in terror as they fell down the deep end.


End file.
